Forget Filling Ad Breaks; Some Marketers Make the Podcasts

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A recording session for “LifeAfter,” a fiction podcast produced by General Electric with the Panoply podcasting network. G.E.’s last series reached No. 1 on iTunes.

By Rob Walker

Nov. 20, 2016

FOR a brand seeking to reach the podcast-listening public, there is one thing better than sponsoring a hit series: creating your own. General Electric pulled it off last year with its quaintly named GE Podcast Theater. Its eight-part science-fiction thriller “The Message,” produced with the Panoply podcasting network, hit No. 1 on the iTunes podcast chart and had nearly five million downloads.

Now comes “LifeAfter,” a futuristic 10-episode drama, the first installment of which was released this month. It tells the story of a low-level worker at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who is obsessed with the traces of life his dead wife left behind on social media, particularly a fictional audio service. The first episode kicks off with what sounds like an ad for that service — but perhaps that’s a wink of sorts. As with “The Message,” a notable detail in this branding experiment is that the sponsoring brand is, by design, almost never mentioned.

Distributing and helping create such “sponsor content” has been part of Panoply’s business for a while. Think of it as a variation on the so-called native advertising or branded content now so familiar online — material flagged as having been paid for, but crafted to resemble editorial content. According to Matt Turck, Panoply’s chief revenue officer, the company has produced more than 100 episodes of custom podcast series for brands including Purina, Umpqua Bank, Prudential and Starbucks.

“It’s been an important part of our business,” he said. “It generates revenue and differentiates us in the marketplace.”

That last part may change: For example, another podcast network, Gimlet Media, now has a unit called Gimlet Creative, which this year created a six-episode “branded podcast” for eBay called “Open for Business.”

Panoply spun out of the podcast unit of the online magazine Slate in 2015, positioning itself as a platform for shows produced with partners like The Wall Street Journal and Vox, as well as its own roster of programs. Relatively quickly, Mr. Turck said, the possibility of sponsored shows was added to the mix. G.E., which previously worked with Slate Custom, the site’s sponsored-content division, and became intrigued by podcasting, ended up being one of the first examples.

But its approach has been distinct. Most sponsored podcasts follow a fairly traditional hosts-and-interviews format. The decision to turn “The Message” into a multipart series was inspired in part by the runaway success of the true-crime podcast “Serial.” But the fictional form was an attempt to do something different — “a new way of reprising the kind of radio dramas of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s,” said Alexa Christon, head of media innovation for G.E. (The name “GE Podcast Theater” echoes “General Electric Theater,” an anthology series on radio and television in the 1950s and early 1960s that was hosted by Ronald Reagan.)

One of the plot twists in “The Message” — its story unfolded as a fake podcast documenting efforts to decode an alien communiqué — was loosely inspired by sound-therapy technology that G.E. is working on. But since that connection is never mentioned, most listeners probably never got it. The name “GE Podcast Theater” is noted at the beginning and end of the series, and on the “cover art” people see when playing an episode on smartphones — but that’s it.

Andy Goldberg, G.E.’s chief creative officer, said this was in line with the company’s “branded entertainment” work in other media — such as the six-episode science series “Breakthrough,” made last year in collaboration with the National Geographic Channel. Too many references to the sponsor “turns people off,” Mr. Goldberg said. “People knew it was GE Podcast Theater,” he said, suggesting that listeners gave the company “a lot of credit” for keeping a light touch.

Backing up that assertion is tricky — one of the widely noted shortcomings of podcast advertising is the dearth of detailed audience data. Outside of download numbers, Ms. Christon said, G.E. judged the success of “The Message” partly by way of “the organic groups that have sprung up” in places like Reddit, swapping plot theories and even generating fan fiction.

G.E. used a similar method to create “LifeAfter.” The internal marketing group zeroed in on the company’s “Digital Twin” research, which seeks to precisely replicate physical objects (like a specific aircraft engine). Applying that idea to humans was a jumping-off point for a fictional story, fleshed out in collaboration with the creative agency BBDO, the agency Giant Spoon and Panoply. Panoply essentially runs the production out of its studios, with its team of sound engineers and producers, helping recruit writers (it brought in the playwright Mac Rogers for “The Message”) and voice actors. “This was the most collaborative effort that I’ve worked on,” said Mr. Turck of Panoply.

Of course, the success of “The Message” added some pressure. And the more crowded the podcast market becomes — including a wave of fiction shows — the harder it is to break through. “We’ve got very high expectations,” Mr. Turck said, adding that the first episode of “LifeAfter” cracked the top 20 on iTunes within a week of its release.

The most prominent form of podcast sponsorship remains the familiar advertising break, often referring to specific instructions for listeners to get a discount or other offer — a direct-response style that makes ad performance more bluntly measurable. But Mr. Turck says plenty of clients want to experiment; he points to Prudential’s “MoneyMind” project with Panoply, which involves taking a finance-themed sponsored quiz on Slate that leads to a podcast episode chosen according to your answers. Some marketers want to brainstorm, others want advice; attitudes vary on formats and how heavy-handed the branding should be. The only thing that’s consistent, he said, is that “there’s just more and more interest.”

Neither G.E. nor Panoply would disclose specifics about costs, but Mr. Goldberg acknowledges that compared with, say, film or TV, even a slick-sounding podcast is “not a massive expense.” And despite the challenges in measuring the impact, it also means an opportunity for G.E. to insert itself, however obliquely, into broader cultural conversations: “LifeAfter” will ultimately address such trendy topics as artificial intelligence and the possibility of a “digital afterlife.”

It’s a means, Ms. Christon said, for doing something the best advertising always strives for: “capitalizing on the zeitgeist.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Forget Filling Ad Breaks; Some Marketers Make the Podcasts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe